Boston Adventures will meet your group at the start –Explain the rules of scavenger hunt.

Break into TEAMS with TEAM Chaperones (that you choose in advance)

EXPLORE CAMBRIDGE & EXPERIENCE THE LITERARY WORLD OF THE PAST & PRESENT

Enjoy learning about famous literary people and historic places, where these people lived and worked. See famous landmarks, explore Harvard campus, Massachusetts Avenue, Brattle Street and more. Perhaps everyone will write their own play or poem and some short stories as part of the scavenger hunt.

SOME FUN SITES INCLUDE:

Harvard Square / OUT OF TOWN NEWS

Widener library

Harvard Campus / Harvard Yard

MIT COOP

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Home (private tour)

The house was a favorite gathering place for many prominent philosophers and writers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel

Hawthorne and Charles Dickens. Longfellow’s descendants preserved the house and the poet’s furnishings and collections until 1962 when they presented them to the nation.

Other fun sites and places of interest include:

The HARVARD BOOKSTORE

Cambridge Common Famous Statues / Buildings

Have lunch after the scavenger hunt, bring a lunch with you to eat along the Charles River or in the Square or choose a restaurant that appeals to you!
Teachers (chaperones) & their students will enjoy exploring and learning about literature and famous people, places and events!

Great team Prizes, awards ceremony & free souvenir picture CD. We will include a wrap-up at the end before you board the buses.
Call for prices: (chaperones are complimentary) based on certain group sizes.

We will provide a complete itinerary with all that is included once we have your date reserved.

INTERESTING LITERATURE & WRITER’S WORKS

Dickensian Roots

Dickensian Roots

Dickens was born February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England. His father, John, made a decent living as a clerk for the British navy, but he had trouble sticking to a budget. When Charles was 10, John moved the family to London. Two years later, John went to jail–for not paying his debts.

To help the family foot the bills, 12-year-old Charles went to work in a shoe-polish factory. His coworkers mocked the “young gentleman,” who hated his job. The work was hard and the pay was low, but firsthand experience of a London factory and debtors’ prison eventually repaid Dickens in full.

Writer’s Rise

After a brief (and unremarkable) return to school, a 15-year-old Dickens found a better job, working as a clerk in a law office. He shortly taught himself shorthand–and became a court reporter, then a parliamentary reporter, then a newspaper reporter. By the time he was 20, Dickens had firsthand experience with the courts and parliament, too.
At 21, he began publishing original sketches and stories in various magazines and newspapers under the pen name “Boz” (rhymes with “nose”). Those won him enough of a following to merit the publication of Sketches by Boz in 1836. A few weeks later, he embarked on the project that first won him serious fame: the Pickwick Papers.

The Papers didn’t simply emerge from Dickens’s authorial imagination. The project began when a publisher approached him and asked him to write a serialized comic narrative to go along with a set of engravings by a well-known artist. Dickens said yes–then stole the show with his prose.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Primary Works

Twice-Told Tales, 1837; Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846; The Scarlet Letter, 1850; The House of Seven Gables , 1851; The Blithedale Romance, 1852; The Life of Franklin Pierce, 1852; The Marble Faun , 1860; The Centenary Edition of the Works of Hawthorne, 18 vols. ed. W. Charvat et al., 1962-1987.

3. His writing is representative of 19th century, and, thus, in the mainstream due to his use of nature, its primitiveness, and as a source of inspiration; also in his use of the exotic, the gothic, and the antiquarian.